


Does liking AOS Kirk make me a bad person?

by Wingittofreedom



Category: Star Trek, Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies), Star Trek: The Original Series
Genre: AOS Jim and TOS Jim, Apologetics, Essay, M/M, Meta, Sexism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-26
Updated: 2019-06-26
Packaged: 2020-05-19 21:18:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,921
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19364272
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wingittofreedom/pseuds/Wingittofreedom
Summary: “James T. Kirk was considered to be a great man...but that was another life.”TOS Kirk is definitely a better person than AOS Kirk. So why do we still love New!Jim?





	Does liking AOS Kirk make me a bad person?

**Author's Note:**

  * For [TheGodWith5Yen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheGodWith5Yen/gifts), [summerofspock](https://archiveofourown.org/users/summerofspock/gifts).



> “He’s like an animal, a thoughtless, brutal animal, yet it’s me… me.” -Kirk, The Enemy Within

Alright, I’ll say it. I like AOS Kirk more than I like TOS Kirk. And I feel guilty as hell about it. 

Why the guilt, you ask?

That’s easy. Because TOS Kirk is unequivocally the better human being while AOS Kirk is—to put it bluntly—a misogynistic pig. 

This acknowledged, why am I still infatuated by AOS Kirk? Why do I still spend time writing and reading fanfiction about him, and gazing at fanart of him?

Am I a bad person because unconsciously or not I've chosen to be twitterpated by the boorish, chauvinistic, violent, immature, Hollywood-machine version of the same character? 

To answer these oh so pressing questions and illuminate the icky truth of where AOS Kirk comes from, why he's so different from TOS Kirk, and what that means, we're going to have to take a quick jaunt back to 1966 to figure out who James T. Kirk was _supposed_ to be.

(Here's a little shiny TOS Kirk to put you in the mood:)

[ ](https://www.flickr.com/photos/161542031@N07/48417583042/in/dateposted-public/)

**_Pop Culture Captain Kirk v. Actual Captain Kirk_ **

If you’ve watched Star Trek TOS, you probably were surprised by Captain Kirk (I mean his _character_ , not his cute, soft-but-firm midsection). He wasn't exactly what you expected, right? He wasn't _Captain_ _Kirk,_ or at least not the version you expected.

If you got this disconcerting feeling of double-vision when watching (or even re-watching) TOS, you’re not alone. Because long before AOS Jim entered the picture, there have always been two Captain Kirks. 

And I’m not talking about Mirror Kirk or his evil double in _The Enemy Within_. I’m talking about the difference between TOS Captain Kirk and  _how we remember TOS Captain Kirk_ _,_  (aka "Pop Culture Captain Kirk")who are two, entirely separate people as it turns out.

In her wonderful long form essay “Kirk Drift,” Erin Horáková lays out the difference between these two Kirks—the real one and his popular image—in much more detail than I’m going to. 

The Sparknotes version is that Pop Culture Captain Kirk is a rash, testosterone-fueled frontiersman—a sort of space cowboy crossed with an adrenaline junky—a pathological womanizer who hits on any _woman_ with a pulse (no homo), a Don Juan-Lothario, breaking rules whenever the fuck he feels like it, fighting before thinking; a swashbuckling man of action, the ultimate rebel—with or without a cause.

As Horáková succinctly puts it, Pop Culture Captain Kirk "is bullshit.”

 _Actual_ TOS Captain Kirk is almost the complete opposite of how we like to remember him. 

Described by a fellow crewmate as “a stack of books with legs” TOS Kirk is a workaholic who “lived a mostly celibate life primarily dedicated to his responsibilities…respected his superior officers and bureaucrats to the point that it caused him problems, and violated orders only in extreme circumstances due to his loyalty to friends,” (quote from vintagegeekcultre). 

Picard-like in his intellectualness (playing chess and quoting literature), TOS Kirk always tries to find diplomatic solutions to problems before resorting to violence, has a strict rule never to hit on members of his own crew and often turns down women who hit on him, citing duty as his reason. 

The women he _does_ have sexual or romantic relationships with generally fall into two categories: monogamous romantic relationships with intelligent, independent women, and women he gets with calculatedly—in weird situations where he’s trying to protect his crew.

So why do we remember Kirk _so_ incorrectly? Where did what Horáková calls our “mass hallucination” of Pop Culture Captain Kirk come from? One that has “little or no basis in Shatner’s performance and the television show as aired.”

Boiled down, Kirk's mischaracterization—what Horáková terms “Kirk Drift”—happens because our collective memory sucks balls.

Humans are great at getting the gist of things.

...but we aren't so great at remembering details, sifting through laborious facts, or caring about truth for it's own sake. Sucky, but more or less accurate, and it turns out we get worse at these tasks when we do them as a group. We're good at broad strokes, but the finer points can get left by the wayside. Which isn't _always_ a bad thing, but this time we’ve all been had, and had dangerously. **¹**

Because the way we remember Captain Kirk isn’t neutral. Our collective memories (faulty as they are) have been hijacked by misogyny and racism (aka the powers that be), slowly shifting the way we remember Jim away from how he was actually portrayed.

One example of the mistaken, hypersexual portrayals which have helped create + feed into Pop Culture Captain Kirk is a 2009 (2009!) article written by a dude named Rob Bricken titled “Captain Kirk’s 8 Most Impressive Love Conquests,” with a very factually incorrect introduction that reads     

> “For three glorious seasons, _Star Trek_ ‘s Captain James T. Kirk boldly seduced and explored women no Earth-man had been with before. Well, okay, some of them were from Earth, but Starfleet’s greatest discovery was that no women anywhere in the cosmos could resist the intense gaze and oft-exposed, tanned pecs of the _Enterprise_ ’s head honcho. Who can blame them, really? Of the many, many seductions committed by James T. Kirk, here are the 8 most impressive (not most exotic, which would totally include the green Orion Slave Girl, but this doesn’t, because Kirk had no problems getting under her Orion’s belt), which deserve to be recorded in the Captain’s Log for all eternity.”

Gross enough for you? 

William Shatner’s 1960’s Kirk is by no means a “flawless harbinger of third wave intersectional thinking,” (Horáková) but he’s not _that_. 

I find it pretty ironic that both of the times Kirk gets doubled in the original show, in _The Enemy Within_ and _Mirror, Mirror_ , the bad Kirk we get is much more like the Kirk we remember: a man who doesn’t take no for an answer, even when he should. 

So why do we cherish this insipid, morally bankrupt version of Kirk in our minds and hearts? Why did we twist a respectful space nerd into a sexist macho stereotype? 

Because that’s exactly what we’ve done. We’ve misremembered Kirk through the distorted lens of toxic masculinity: stripping away his more “effeminate” qualities (intellectualism, careful decision making, respect for authority) and made him into just another action movie “hero”—a man who wins the day through swagger and brutishness.

It’s also important to understand that misremembering Kirk the way we have is also an act of antisemitic whitewashing. As Horáková writes,          

> “...re-writing Kirk as the Zapp Brannigan popular idea of Kirk doesn’t just do harm to the character and introduce a new 'Kirk' defined by chauvinistic violence: there’s also an element of goy-washing. Shatner’s Jewish body is over-written by this Lord Flashheart Wagnerian colossus.”

Despite her esoteric references, Horáková’s point is spot on. Why do we always remember that Nimoy was Jewish while forgetting that Shatner was too? The “all-American man” version of Kirk is just as antisemitic as it is misogynistic.

And that’s where we get to AOS Kirk. 

[ ](https://www.flickr.com/photos/161542031@N07/48478225571/in/dateposted-public/)

He’s Pop Culture Kirk through and through, with absolutely none of his predecessors better qualities—the Mr. Hyde to TOS Kirk’s Dr. Jekyll—and goy-washed to boot.

Want evidence? Look no further than how he consistently solves problems by making impulsive, reckless, emotionally driven decisions (and how we are asked to believe these are superior to well thought-through plans) and seems to enjoy countermanding orders for the hell of it. As far as attitudes towards women, he hits on them whether they want him to or not,* treats them like tools (Gaila), and likes to watch while they change even when they don't know he's there?? (like wtf).

In this sense, he's our collective fantasy Captain Kirk come to life—the zombie-like specter of toxic masculinity—a lumbering, tortured stereotype of the Kirk we _think_ we want to see. 

I could give a million more examples of how this is true—from the way he heartlessly uses Gaila, to how he gawks at Carol Marcus, to his catcalling, and the throw away aside in _Into Darkness_ where Christine Chapel is casually character assassinated with the explanation that she literally _transferred to the outer frontier to get away from AOS Kirk_ _because he was either sexually harassing her or had treated her_ that _poorly_ — _a direct subordinate on his ship._

Here’s the complete, damning conversation:

CAROL MARCUS: You're much cleverer than your reputation suggests, Captain Kirk.

KIRK: I have a reputation?

CAROL MARCUS: Yes, you do. I'm a friend of Christine Chapel's.

KIRK: Christine, yes. How is she?

CAROL MARCUS: She transferred to the outer frontier to be a nurse. She's much happier now.

KIRK: That's good.

CAROL MARCUS: You have no idea who I'm talking about, do you?

Ouch. 

Did you just cringe? I certainly did. 

Not only did AOS Kirk traumatize Chapel enough that she transferred to the ‘outer frontier’ (a "canonically dangerous zone") but he did this to her when she was under his authority, apparently giving her no choice but to make a career-damaging decision to get away from him.

Yes you’ve got a reputation Captain Kirk. And it’s not pretty.

***

 **¹** As Horáková points out “Kirk Drift” (aka the way we misremember people and characters on mass) is a phenomenon that affects more than just Star Trek. Think about the way people water MLK down from Marxist, strident anti-racist agitator to just wholesome “I have a dream,” or the way we’ve turned Jesus from a radically egalitarian brown Jewish man into a white guy therapist.

*None of this is to say that Jim being "promiscuous"/hitting on women is inherently bad, because lol, that would be wrong/slut-shaming etc. I'm just pointing out that the way his sex-life is _framed_ is wrong, i.e. as conquest over women. Like how different would the optics be if we saw Jim hitting on/in bed with a dude? (answer: So Different. and i swear i mean this in an academic way, not just out of the desires of my horny heart—although that'd be nice Big Media).

**_“Let me help”: In defense of New!Jim_ **

Okay, so at this point things are looking grim for those of us who like AOS Kirk, those of us who write fanfiction about him or who draw him in fanart, who identify with him or think he's cool. 

Should we, as Horáková does, denounce New!Kirk entirely as a bad job? Is there any way to save him from the depths of J.J. Abrams’ frat boy sexist portrayal? 

Because despite all this horror, I (and so many of us) somehow still manage like—and even love—AOS Kirk. 

This confusing feeling is all the more important to consider in the era of Me Too, where decades and centuries of work-place sexism and rape-culture are being called out, in a time where Donald Trump is our president even after the nation heard the incriminating Hollywood Access Tape (“grab her by the pussy”) and Brett Kavanaugh is a _Justice_ on the Supreme Court despite the fact that he was very credibly accused of sexual assault. 

These difficult realities are making a lot of us wonder how to be good feminists and good people. 

So the question now is, can we continue to like AOS' Pop Culture Kirk (who, I’ll say it, shares more than a few qualities with our current president or at least the way dude tries to pass himself off) and still be both?

I hope so. And I’m going to do my best to show you why in spite—and to some extent _because_ —of his horrible, awful flaws, I still love AOS Jim Kirk.

While part of the reason we’re able to forget or overlook his character defects is perhaps internalized misogyny (that’s the real ‘enemy within’ after all), I think there’s something more complicated at work. Something beyond the simple fact that Chris Pine is good-looking as hell and could make a rock he was playing seem charming.

What that something is—the deep, profound reason that we, despite our moral qualms, have found a beautiful sympathetic _something_ in AOS Kirk—is that he’s dealing with these exact questions. 

Hear me out. 

Without a father figure to model himself on (the one that TOS Kirk had), AOS Kirk is stranded in a world where his only models for masculinity are his awful stepfather/uncle Frank and the expectations of the world—the same world and the same expectations that created the dumbed-down hypersexual violence of Pop Culture Kirk.

In this sense, AOS Jim is nothing more than the incarnation of expectations _en masse_ gone wrong.

He’s a man freighted with our collective projection of what we, the world, think a hero should be. 

And true to the way that expectations warp us, he became our (and his) fantasy of the brash and boorish hero, staggering under the weight of our bloated desires.

With this in mind, is it truly surprising that he’s an immature, foolish parody of all the worst parts of TOS Jim exaggerated? 

I don’t think so. Because we always get what we want, we just don’t always like it when we do.

The important thing is, neither does AOS Kirk himself. 

As so many fanfiction writers have deftly picked up on, AOS Kirk _hates_ himself. Why else does he intentionally piss off the women he hits on or push so hard to get himself beat up by half the characters in Star Trek 2009—from Cupcake to Spock?

(And let’s not forget about Spock himself. The reason he hates Kirk is all of the above—and because he hates himself and the parody he’s become too, Kirk’s taunts all boiling down to the nasty but true _‘You’re just like me. You just won’t admit it.’_ But New!Spock is a whole different essay, so let’s stick to Jim for now.)

That’s why _Star Trek: Beyond_ is so important. 

In it, we see Kirk a changed man. Relying on his crew rather than trying to egotistically do everything himself, no catcalling and an utterly transformed relationship with Spock that reads like a litmus test; think of the unbearable beauty of “ _We will do what we have always done, Jim. We will find hope in the impossible,”_ and the symbolism of Spock pulling Jim out of the air as he falls to his death trying to save his crew in a plane precariously (and hilariously) flown by Dr. McCoy. It's not perfect, but _Beyond is_ a sea-change.

So I guess that’s my best answer. 

AOS Jim does not begin as the consummate human being that TOS Jim always was. Together though, they are two indelible parts of the same psychology—with AOS Kirk in 2009 and STID as the unflattering double and TOS Kirk and AOS Kirk from _Beyond_ looking sadly backwards, at what we made, shaking their heads in ashamed sorrow, turning to Spock and saying ‘I don’t know how I ever thought that was me. What a nightmare.’ 

And Spock, kind and honest as always replying ‘There is evil in all of us Jim. You have conquered that which was within you. You are not a pure man, but you are a _good_ one and for that, I love you.’

Spock forgives and loves him and so do we.

Because what I’m saying is, with AOS Jim Kirk we got what we wanted. 

For better and worse, we exchanged TOS Kirk’s maturity for bigger, uglier human flaws, gaining the titillation of a ‘dark past’ and Nero-like, we deprived him of the life he might have had, taking away his positive male role models and creating a vulnerable, self-hating hero shaped by the twisted cultural expectations of toxic masculinity.

So what did we gain? What can we salvage from this wreck? 

That’s easy too. We got to watch someone struggle not only with comic-book evil nemesis, but with the real evil within himself: his own and the world’s warped expectations of him as a man and as a hero. 

We got to see these ugly expectations defeated, proof that they _can_ be defeated. 

And we got to help. We wrote and continue to write Jewish!Kirk and Female!Kirk. We gave him a period (and even got him pregnant, lol guys). We write about Jim respecting Uhura, the women around him, and fighting back against misogyny. 

Filling in what they left out, we got to write about the healing of a man, the reworking of a character—with needle, thread, and sticky tape if need be—helping to transform a chauvinist buffoon into a good Captain and a good man. 

Broken and tarnished AOS Kirk is not lost. He still finds Spock and McCoy. We still found him. He gets better.

So I guess what I’m *really* saying is that there’s an element of New!Kirk in us all. Burdened and scarred by the gendered cages we’re shoved into from birth, twisted by the world’s and our own expectations of what we’re supposed to be, fatherless and broken-hearted by each new discovery of racism and misogyny, of our own fallibility—but ultimately strong enough to overcome. Strong enough to grow. Strong enough to change. Strong enough to forgive ourselves and reach out.

We don't believe in no-win scenarios.

In short, New!Kirk gave us the beauty of getting to see what’s possible with love: of getting to help a character we cherish go from being his own worst nightmare to becoming the man he was always supposed to be.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to the wonderful [TheGodWith5Yen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheGodWith5Yen/pseuds/TheGodWith5Yen) for looking this over for me!
> 
> Inspired by [this](https://vintagegeekculture.tumblr.com/post/161097004886/pop-culture-captain-kirk-vs-actual-captain-kirk) tumblr post by vintagegeekculture as well as Horáková's [essay](http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/columns/freshly-rememberd-kirk-drift/).
> 
> I'm on tumblr at [@wingittofreedom](https://wingittofreedom.tumblr.com). You can reblog [this post](https://wingittofreedom.tumblr.com/post/185851972444/does-liking-aos-kirk-make-me-a-bad-person-star) if you'd like others to find this!


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